Toting up my fic, and the reactions to the proliferation of it, has reminded me of another notable time of creative frenzy.
When I first met The Poem.
(Names have been changed, because so few people write on this one it’s actually an identifier.)
This was in the second year of my Master’s, and I was taking an Am Lit Poetry course, and had told my prof that I’d rather like to do something of The Writer’s for my final paper, and did he know of anything that hadn’t been done to death already?
For some mysterious reason, possibly related to the workings of cosmic fate and strange karma, he did not say “Oh, almost nothing’s been done on The Writer’s poetry at all, pick anything!”, which would have been the bare truth. Instead he looked thoughtful and said, “Well, you might try The Poem.”
So, all innocent, I went down to the library and looked up The Poem. I discovered it was a 500 plus page epic poem. For futher mysterious reasons, possibly related to the workings of cosmic fate and strange karma, I did not heave it back onto the shelf but instead checked it out and brought it home. I read it.
Then I read it again, appalling my librarianly spouse so badly by being unable to prevent myself writing the most delicate of pencil notes in the margins that he went and bought me my very own Northwestern-Newberry Critical Edition. I was delighted. I meticulously copied over all couple hundred pages worth of my pencil notes (and conscientiously erased them from the library copy).
Then I went back to the library and did a full-scale literature search, checked out the grand total of four books with relevant sections, copied every last one of the twenty or so articles that talked about the poem, ILLing the eight or so we didn’t have holdings for, and brought those home to read and make notes in, too.
And then I wrote.
When I showed up for the final presentations, with my fourty page “essay”, not counting footnotes, one of my classmates asked me, only half joking, what kind of drugs I’d been on.
As best I can recall, this whole process took me about a month.
It felt exactly the way it felt when I was first writing FMA fic, or when I wrote “Challenge” for PoT. I was seized by an idea and went through the days in a haze of sparkling thoughts and words, and when I turned around an absurdly short length of time later, there was this pile of writing. And it was good.
I think this is the most basic reason why I do not draw any real distinction between “creative” and “critical” writing; they feel just the same. Wonderfully overwhelming at their best.
